Flickr Co-Founder Has a Hunch: Personal Data Will Drive the Future

NEW YORK — Caterina Fake, the former Salon.com art director who co-launched Flickr in 2004 and sold it to Yahoo the following year for around $30 million, wants to help you figure out what your next move should be, no matter what quandary you’re contemplating.

The latest company she’s co-founded, Hunch.com — a small, eleven-person outfit based in New York’s flatiron district — is designed to answer any question, whether it’s what kind of dog you should rescue from the pound, how best to respond to a personal insult or which conference to attend. As it recommends, it also learns, developing over time unique profiles of its users.

At Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference in New York on Monday, Fake said Hunch expands on her experience with her previous employer’s products, Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Search, to provide such recommendations without falling into the trap she says plagues other vertical recommendation services.

The problem? NetFlix doesn’t know if you wear striped socks

“Recommendation systems that you see now [such as] Amazon and Netflix, historically, have worked along verticals,” said Fake. “Amazon knows what your purchase history is, what books you’re reading, that you bought this grill, that you’re a ‘stainless steel kitchen’-type person, and then are able to make recommendations along those lines,” while Netflix bases its recommendations on previously-watched movies.

“One of our ideas was that if we radically expanded the dataset” used to make recommendations, said Fake, Hunch would be able to fill in gaps that vertical recommendation engines like those offered by Amazon or Netflix cannot fill.

For instance, she said Netflix’s movie recommendation contest unearthed a key problem with using only movies to predict which movies someone will like: it doesn’t know whether you wear striped socks, for instance.

“They found there was a bunch of movies that resisted affinity,” said Fake. “They could not figure out who liked a movie like Napoleon Dynamite, which was kind of a weird movie. It could be that they didn’t have the right input. For instance, they didn’t know that people who wear striped socks rather than [solid] socks [may have been more or less likely to score it highly].”

The Facebook privacy flap was a good thing, because it raised awareness of the issues

One way Hunch.com plans to make money is by having eBay, Sears, Target or similar companies filter their users to special versions of its recommendation engine, where they would answer up to ten questions before being suggested certain products.

Any company that wants to mine your brain and recommend products to you must be careful about privacy, especially in light of the recent Facebook privacy kerfuffle.

“I think [the Facebook privacy flap] was a great thing,” said Fake. “It was on the cover of Time magazine the following week… [But] the idea that lemming-like social network slaves were being duped, I think that was inaccurate … Facebook responded to it, and I think it had a net positive outcome for everybody in terms of awareness of these issues.”

She said Hunch is transparent about what it does and promised it would never sell user profiles to advertisers. However, she also has a hunch that the future belongs to whoever figures out how to use all of the user data on Web 2.0 sites like Flickr and Hunch in a way that benefits the people contributing it.

“One of the things that we saw with the efflorescence of Web 2.0 was that there are now exobytes and exobytes of data online,” said Fake. “The future of the internet goes to whosoever is able to make all of this information work for the benefit of people out there who are trying to find things and are standing on the corner of 44th street and 5th avenue and it’s their mother’s birthday in two weeks, and they know it, and their computer knows it, and also knows that her taste is such that if there’s three scarves that are actually in inventory at Sax 5th Avenue, and if she just walks up the five blocks, she can get that for her. If you are able to solve problems like that for people, that will be immensely useful to people.”

Hunch gathers such a wide variety of data from its users that it may in fact be able to fill in gaps left unfilled by vertical recommendation engines such as Amazon’s and Netflix’s. For example, it has ascertained that people who prefer their sandwiches cut diagonally also prefer Ray-Ban sunglasses.

We have a ways to go until Ray-Ban can make use of that information, but perhaps we won’t have to wait as long as we think.